FACT: If you’re diagnosed with breast cancer and you’re given chemo, although your tumour may shrink, your cancer is more likely to spread. And it’s the cancer spread that will kill you, not the tumour.

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I’ve reported on this bombshell discovery before, and now we have yet more evidence from a team at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine. In laboratory tests, they’ve discovered why chemo can have such paradoxical effects on breast cancer - on the one hand reducing the cancer mass itself, but on the other causing it to spread.

Cancer metastasis is known to be triggered by a special set of cancer cells called TMEM cells, and lo and behold these are the very cells actually created by chemotherapy, say the high-powered NY researchers. “We have shown that chemotherapy increases the density and activity of TMEM sites and promotes distant metastasis,” they reported in July this year. “In the residual breast cancers of patients treated with neoadjuvant paclitaxel after doxorubicin plus cyclophosphamide, TMEM score…increased, suggesting that chemotherapy, despite decreasing tumor size, increases the risk of metastatic dissemination.”

Year after year, doctors have watched this terrible consequence of their treatments unfolding before their eyes, and yet have continued to subject women to it, seemingly shrugging their shoulders at the results. “Systemic agents are active at the beginning of therapy in 90% of primary breast cancers. However, after a variable period of time, progression occurs. At that point, resistance to therapy is not only common but expected,”. admit oncologists at the prestigious MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas. “Approximately 30% of all patients with early-stage breast cancer have recurrent disease, which is metastatic in most cases. Once metastatic disease develops, the possibility of a cure is very limited or practically non-existent.”